Wing Commander... that name... the name that dates back to 1991
when the original hit by Chris Roberts was released. You must've
heard of it, lest you lived in a trailer park with a broken satellite
dish, no TV and no Internet for the past 8 years. Much has
happened since then, and, having released Wing Commander II,
III, IV, Chris Roberts left Origin. Was that why Prophecy was ...
different? We'll never know. The storyline was radically different,
the atmosphere, even the cast started to mutate - we all know
what happened by the end of Prophecy. In any case, building
upon the events outlined in Prophecy, Secret Ops, at the same
time, shines with a few new features, namely the fact that it's free.
Admittedly, Origin could afford to release a free game, as this is
basically Prophecy with the FMV's stripped out - but nevertheless,
it's a Wing Commander, and an excellent one at that. But more to
the point, and, mind you, if you want a usual review of strictly Secret
Ops, jump to Umax's review - mine's about SO with flashbacks as
well as elements of epic nostalgia and digression.

Origin has been widely criticized for their server problems with
Ultima Online, and I feared this would be the case with SO... and
so it was. I was fortunate to drop by their site on August 24th, about
10 - 15 minutes after registration started, so their servers were not
yet swept by a tidal wave of people trying to get their usernames,
but, as you'll see in Umax's review, he was not as lucky. I also
happened to stumble upon ftp.download.com's release of it about
20 minutes before it was posted on their site, so I had a chance to
get it off before their lines saturated, as well. In any case, this
time, Origin did a better job, in my view, of mirroring downloads
(well, fine, UO wasn't downloadable, but at least corporate policy
didn't prevent them from offloading the WC:SO archive them to
multiple servers). I believe they should've done a better job with
mirroring registration, as I'm sure many people would've
volunteered ATM links just for the Wing Commander cause.

'Mais retournons au nos moutons.' The idea behind SO is similar to
that of a soap opera, but without the lamented crying and trying to
figure out for about 15 - 20 years who is whose son. After the initial
download, which includes 5 missions, there will be an 8-mission
addon each week, for a period of 7 weeks. That idea sounds pretty
good, until you try the game and find yourself compelting the
initial download missions in under an hour - or so I did, anyway. A
neat feature, incidentally, is that when you register, depending on
the data you provide Origin with, such as your past Wing
Commander experience, etc. your game settings will be somewhat
different, in particular, game difficulty. Of course, you can chicken
out and lower the difficulty, but I find it's still a neat feature.

A word has to be said about cutscenes. I'm not sure why this
feature is so overlooked in most games - perhaps, because it's
much easier to just do an FMV shoot and get it over with, but so
far, I've seen two games that implemented it, one well, the other
well enough - Final Fantasy VII and WC:SO. I'm talking about
engine-rendered cinematics. What I mean by that are cutscenes,
but which are rendered using the game engine - like you saw your
character walk around, etc. but without your control. If done
properly, like I believe it was done in FF7, it could help the game
greatly, as you will no longer play a character that look a certain
way, make up your own opinion of him, etc. - then have an FMV
where he looks like a bum from that street next to you.
Engine-rendered scenes, though, always use the same 3D models
throughout the game, so you never feel like you're suddenly
seeing some weird guy that you've never noticed in the game.
There is, of course, the other extreme - fully FMV-based games,
such as Gabriel Knight II, but that requires significant amounts of
media, and stresses your CD-ROM a lot, thereby automatically
raising the requirements plank. In WC:SO the engine-rendered
cutscenes are not earth-shattering, but, on the other hand, the
reason why it's so small (comparative to, say, Prophecy) is that
FMVs are no longer used in the game, and they sure get the point
across.

The gameplay closely resembles Prophecy, as well as the previous
Wing Commanders, which is a great thing. Umax compares this
game to Descent: Freespace, but I really doubt there's a
comparison - Freespace is a _spinoff_ from a pretty good game,
and Wing Commander IS the good game. It has a story to it, it has
an atmosphere, it has the dedication of fans, it has something
Freespace can never have. The flight models are somewhat
simplified in SO, I admit - but many nifty tricks can be done, which
truly shows off ace pilots: for example, the Vampire has incredible
pitch rate, but a relatively low yaw rate - so when you need a
quick turn to the starboard, you'd roll your ship right, then pull up -
instead of just turning right - thereby doing a quicker turn than you
normally would. There's also the autoslide, which is, perhaps, one
of the cleverest inventions of all time - and other space sims don't
seem to have it for some reason. The story of the autoslide is
interesting. It was originally called the Shelton slide, and was
implemented in WC2 on the Sabre, then later on on all ships in
WC3 and 4, and then, in Prophecy (and SO) only on some, which
was pretty disconcerting, if you got majorly used to it (given that it
saved your life way more than once, you really should have).
Missiles and guns stick to the tradition, which was briefly violated
by WC3 where all guns looked similar, just with different colors.
The Cloudburst is a pretty neat weapon, and the Swarmer AB is
still there, as well as the usual array of Pilums, HSers, Imrecs and
torpedoes. And one thing that I completely adore about Wing
Commander, which LucasArts never put in any X-Wing games, or
Volition in Freespace - is the waypoint idea. You never know
what'll hit you on the next waypoint - it could be a lone Moray that
strayed from the flock, could be void, could be a whole fleet - and
it's always fun to find it out. (Although I preferred WC2's waypoints,
where surprises were always much more accentuated - you'd fly
into an area, and find three Dorkirs complete with a Jalkehi
escort... now that was fun.)

The graphics in the game are very similar to Prophecy. The
company states that improvements have been made to the engine
- I reserve judgment on that, but so far I haven't seen too many.
That is not to say they're bad - they're perfectly beautiful-looking...
but there's something to the whole Prophecy line that I still can't
put up with... I still maintain WC3 and 4 were the best Wing
Commanders ever made (even though I know general opinion
seems to tend towards them being the worst). And I still find the
ships in Prophecy/WCSO are somewhat unoriginal. That is, the
ships and the whole Aligned (=Alien) idea is original, but ...
somehow I liked hanging on the tail of a Vakthoth in WC3, and
seeing him get ripped apart with my cannons, see pieces of the
ship fall off, then the explosion.... you see none of that in SO. And
while I'm at that, why does shooting asteroids count towards your
percentage hits? That doesn't make much sense.

And while I'm on the complaint bandwagon, here's one, which will
no doubtedly raise some controversy - the flight stats. I was always
proud that WC was story and skill-based, but where every shot you
fire wasn't kept track of, a la X-Wing. Then Prophecy came... and I
don't know if it's a good thing at all. Obviously, the kill score
should be kept track of - that's sacred. But every single laser?.. I'm
not so sure.

In any case, to the sound issues. I found the music to be pretty
good, but not for long - it's a bit repetitive after a while. It seems to
be the music from the ending credits of Prophecy, though - and
back then I liked it, but I guess I never entertained the idea of
listening to it endlessly during missions. The radio chatter is the
same as always, but admittedly, some variety could be thrown in.
In that sense, a neat feature of Descent: Freespace was when one
of your wingmen would scream at you when you pick up a shadow
- which is useful sometimes, in case you want to either drop a
mine or got somewhat carried away with your pursuit. But then
again, skill comes into play here - shake the shadow, and try to
take him out. However, even on nightmare difficulty, I found it to
be all too easy - those bugs just don't fly well enough. I mean, this
is nightmare - why does it fly in a straight line when I get on its tail
and start filling its tailpipes with explosives?

The overall feel of the game is great. There's still no force
feedback support, but I find the shockwave of an explosion is so
well-timed with the boom in the woofer that it almost gives you a
realistic feeling. Granted, the shockwave is completely fake, as
there's nothing in space to _produce_ one, but then again, this
one's for fun, not authentic recreation of space.

In resume, this is an incredible addition to the Wing Commander
saga. The storyline, at the moment, is at a cliffhanger - but that's
the point. I find some missions could be made harder, say by
exponentially increasing the number of enemies for nightmare
level. And that 75% kill ratio bonus is just annoying... but that's my
personal opinion. In any case, this game is most definitely worth
your download time (I've wanted to say something like that for so
long) - and, even though I whined about so many things in it, it's
an incredible game. (Things balance out in life... you try to search
out positive things in a despicably bad item, and you try to 'dump'
on a good item... same here.) And the story truly justifies the 'Price
of freedom is eternal vigilance...'

Pros: great graphics, good control, innovative idea of a free game,
'soap opera' idea sounds like it'll work out well, fast-paced,
action-packed gameplay;

Cons: somewhat easy, relatively annoying 75% kill bonus (as if you
don't kill 75% of the enemies, your mission score is lowered,
so what kind of bonus is that?).

For those of you who may not have heard, or have been living
under a rock, let me explain the premise behind Wing
Commander: Secret Ops. The game was established as the next
in the series of Wing Commander games, to carry on where
Prophecy left off. This would ordinarily be no special thing, its just
another game, in a long running, successful series. Well, not
exactly. The folks at Origin have pulled a really sweet trick here,
Wing Commander: Secret Ops is the first game of its kind, to be
offered completely free over the Internet to the masses. There
have been other "free games" offered online, but they were games
like Sierra's Red Baron, which is old. This game is brand new,
with a new plot and new characters and ships, offered completely
free. There's just a couple of catches though. As good as this offer
sounds to most of us, the file you must download is 118 megs with
all the bells and whistles (or 58 megs without, where bells &
whistles = speech pack), which makes it as large as the demo for
Mech Commander. However, let's keep in mind this large file does
include the first episode (made up of 4 missions) and speech and
music. I thought I was set, I was surfing around on my cable
modem, hooked up with it the night before the 27th and began
downloading the game. Yikes was it ever slow! The game must
have been the most downloaded file of the 26th, maybe even
August. Being the dedicated gamer that I am, I struggled through
the night, with no errors. The next morning, I woke up, and ran
over to my computer, installed it (it came out to 137megs installed)
and realized that to run the game, you had to register your callsign
and get a key code from Origin's website. Hastily, I booted up my
net browser, went to secretops.com and tried to register. Then
tried to register again. And again. And again. Not to upset
anyone at Origin, but it seems they missed one little detail with
there 'free game' venture. Offering it for download is one thing,
you can get it, however slowly it may trickle onto your hard drive.
However, making gamers register online before the game will
work is another thing, especially when the servers that the
registration process is running off of seemed wholly inadequate to
handle the volume of traffic this created. Eventually, I did manage
to register my callsign and get my registration number. Off I went
unknowing into WC:SO...

The first thing that greeted me was a screen saying "Downloading
Mission". This freaked me a little because I thought I might have
to actually download the missions again, but no, this was just a
loading screen. Shortly, this disappeared and up shot the opening
cinematic sequence. This gives you a basic background on what
has happened and why, and who you are. Even if you are
unacquainted with the Wing Commander universe, it would be
quite easy to catch up.

Following the cinematic sequence, you are placed aboard the new
carrier Cerberus, which is very good-looking in the fine Wing
Commander tradition. In fact, all of the ships are beautifully
rendered and look downright gorgeous if your gaming rig is
equipped with a 3D accelerator. (Yes, it works from the first shot
with a Voodoo2, no patches.) There is sourced lighting throughout
the in-game sequences, all true to the stars in the system you
happen to find yourself inhabiting. The stars themselves give off
lens flares, which you can turn off if they become a hindrance in
combat. Other lighting effects include some very nice reflection
effects and other miscellaneous lighting effects like the
countermeasures. When hit, your ship releases blue sparks as it
flies, and as it becomes more damaged, more of these blue sparks
fly out. I honestly thought this was a loose attempt at copying
FreeSpace's very nice sparks. FreeSpace, however, seems to
have chosen the wiser color and refined its particle system a bit
more because the sparks were nothing special in WC:SO. That
aside, the different weapons were very nice to look at, although
they all looked very similar. Firing missiles resulted in the familiar
missile and victim views, which were also quite impressive. As
ships get hit, their shields absorb the damage, as in most past
Wing Commander games. In WC:SO however, the shields were
beautiful. The weapon was absorbed across the shield, in a
moving flash of blue. Explosions, too, were beautiful. Shock
waves were very well done, and different ships each had different
explosions. The background starfield was your basic affair, with
the now standard 'blue and green milky ways' (my own phrase)
and background stars. One thing bugged me though, the planets
were integrated into the starfield and thus looked very unreal.
They would even warp when flying in quick, opposing motions. It
seems to me it would have been better to have just left out the
planets; it worked in FreeSpace.

Gameplay felt just like the past Wing Commanders (with the
exception of perhaps 1+2). This was very nice I felt because the
hardcore Wing Commander game players should feel a sense of
continuity with the game. The plot so far (I say so far because the
plot expands each week) is actually nothing special, but the action
in the missions does partly make up for it. I found that the
missions were organized into waves actually, where you fly from
one waypoint to another and at each successive waypoint, there
were more enemies for you to destroy. This sort of "missile
command" style of action was not a bad thing, in fact, it almost
helped because of how predictable it made the enemies. You
always knew they will be there in force at the next WP. Flight
mechanics were the classic WC style, with slight drift incorporated
into it. It is by no means a simulator, it is definitely an arcade style
game with the classic arcade style gameplay. The only elements
of the in-game missions I truly disliked were the communications
chatter. It was unbelievably pointless. The members of your wing
just repeated their classic inane comments over and over. And
over. And... You get the point. Yes, I admit, you can turn off the
comms completely, but I thought it would be nice not to have them
say such inane comments. Perhaps comments that actually
related to the mission would have been more appropriate than
"pump, PUMP!" and "We did it before, lets do it again" repeated
every 10 seconds.

Sound in the game was satisfactory. There were no amazing
sound effects in the game, but everything was incorporated.
Speech was put in, although you can download a smaller version
of the game without speech, which I would recommend because it
really serves no point in the game. (Providing you're literate, that
is, as you can have close-captions.) The music in the missions was
that hardcore tune they have used before, which I found myself
muting in the first minutes of playing WC:SO. It really depends on
your own preferences.

Unfortunately, WC:SO has no multiplayer option. While it would
have been very complex to work the multiplayer element into a
game with an ever expanding fleet of ships, I think they could
possibly have put in a solely combat oriented multiplayer with only
the fighters available in the first episode. (Much like Armada had)